Monday, July 2, 2012

10-year anniversary

You may have noticed the little link at the right to "Hikes." I started tracking my hikes midway through 2002, but I'd been hiking since not too long after I graduated from college and moved to Seattle; it seemed like something people in the Northwest did. I'm missing, I'd estimate, at least two years of hikes. (A group of us went to Mt. Rainier for a long weekend each of the two years before I started tracking hikes.) Most of these missing hikes, like the early recorded ones, were in Washington state. The Yellowstone trip (and the first attempt at St. Helens) were my last hurrah before moving to Indiana.

I didn't hike much in Indiana. After my first year of grad school, I spend a summer in Colorado, where I hiked most weekends. I tried to keep it up after returning for my second year before being derailed by what turned out to be an IT band injury. This was quickly diagnosed after moving to Tennessee for my PhD, and you can see that PT and exercise got me back onto the trail.

Most of the hikes before the end of 2006 don't have links to photos. I only had a point-and-shoot film camera and didn't take a lot of photos. But for my birthday in 2006, I asked for and got a digital camera. Revolution! Occasionally, there is no photo for a well-traveled local hike, but otherwise my trips are overly documented now.

More recently, you can see a hiccup upon my move to New York; only one hike between last July and this March. Without a car - and without knowing the area - it was more of a challenge to get places. I was busy working. And many Saturdays I had capoeira classes. I've begun to make it more of a priority this summer, but I'm struggling with getting to good hiking areas without a car.

Still, it's been a good ten (or 12) years, and I'm looking forward to more hikes, in more places in the years to come.